‘Beautiful’ Tapestry
Carole King musical delves into her sorrow, successes
Carole King musical delves into her sorrow, successes
During an early reading for “Beautiful: The Carole King Musical” — coming to the Marcus Center on Tuesday — book writer Douglas McGrath quietly took a seat right behind King and her daughter, Sherry. “I wasn’t watching the show,” McGrath recalled, during a recent phone interview. “I was watching Carole. She was laughing out loud. Clapping. Engrossed. Then intermission came, and she and her daughter left the room, as people do during an intermission.” Except that King didn’t come back, even though it was immediately after this reading that she gave McGrath the green light to proceed, with a book for which he’d later be nominated for a Tony.
“She told me it was too painful to relive this story, and vowed she wouldn’t come to the show after it opened,” McGrath said. “When she finally did come, months after the Broadway opening, she came in disguise. She was worried people would watch her instead of the show.”
This anecdote reveals two great truths about King, both given full play in a musical that chronicles her rise to stardom even as her marriage to songwriter
Gerry Goffin fell apart.
Getting personal
First, King’s music is strikingly personal, heralding the great age of the female songwriter that would see King’s “Tapestry” and Joni Mitchell’s “Blue” released with months of each other in 1971.
Beginning with the semiautobiographical “Will You Love Me Tomorrow” — composed with Goffin in 1960 when she was just 17 and making the Shirelles the first black female group to have a No. 1 hit in American history — King’s music is filled with songs reflecting a fear of being abandoned, alone or both.
A musical featuring King’s life can’t help but reflect that sense of loss. “Beautiful” can occasionally reflect even more of it than King’s own 2012 memoir, which is extraordinarily kind and forgiving toward Goffin, despite the infidelities and substance abuse that scuttled their marriage.
“Gerry hurt her,” McGrath said. “But she found something other than anger in her response.” McGrath cited a song like “It’s Too Late,” one of many King hits featured in this show. “There’s a generous spirit in her music,” McGrath noted. “Carole’s songs aren’t judgmental. They’re generous in their understanding of human frailty.”
A reluctant star
Second, King is what McGrath describes as “a very private person” who was notoriously uncomfortable with the limelight — never mind that she’s among the most successful female songwriters from the
last century, with more than 100 songs charting on “Billboard.”
“Carole is a real oxymoron: a bashful star,” McGrath said. “She has everything that a star has and needs, but she’s reluctant to think of herself that way. And she’s not a diva artist like Barbara Streisand or Aretha Franklin — someone whose very exoticism makes her unique and makes us feel that she’s above us.”
In McGrath’s book, King insists that “I’m just a normal person.”
“Before starting this project, I’d thought of Carole as a hippie and a rock-and-roller,” McGrath remembered. “I was wrong. What Carole wanted was conventional: to get married, have kids and move to the suburbs. She wasn’t looking to move to San Francisco and drop acid.
“On the night she finished ‘Will You Love Me,’ at a point when Gerry was still working a day job as a chemist to pay the bills, she left the finished music for him on the piano and went out to play canasta with her mother and her mother’s friends. That reflects a very traditional quality to Carole, and it’s something people love.
“We love Carole the way we love a sister, a best friend, the girl you love in class. And I think that’s because she’s innately modest. It made her uncomfortable to think this entire show would revolve around her.”
Come-to-Carole moment
Originally, it didn’t. “Carole’s reluctance to have this show be about her was among the reasons I’d pitched a quartet, with the title of ‘Us,’ ” McGrath remembered.
“I wanted to write a story of Carole and Gerry as well as their good friends and songwriting rivals Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil.”
“On Broadway,” “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling” and “We Gotta Get Out of This Place” are among the MannWeil hits included in “Beautiful.”
“I wrote a version in which I treated all four of them equally,” McGrath said. “And as soon as we read, it was obvious that Carole and Gerry’s story was more interesting, even if as people all four of them are. Carole is also the figure people coming to the show are most apt to know; it’s her story they want to understand.
“We had a come to Jesus moment — call it a come to Carole moment — in which we realized that we’d need to tilt the show toward Carole and her journey, which I then extended all the way through to ‘Tapestry.’”
Beyond the jukebox
While “Beautiful” leans heavily on “Tapestry,” McGrath aspired to something more than a typical jukebox musical.
“I wanted the show to have the same integrity as the music,” McGrath said.
“I didn’t want it to be another jukebox musical that just raided the catalog for nostalgic purposes. I was always looking for connections between the music and the lives, with the songs being extensions of the text.”
Milwaukee audiences can assess for themselves this week whether McGrath succeeded. We’ll also be seeing a relatively new actor playing King: Julia Knitel, who understudied the Tony-winning Jessie Mueller from the original Broadway cast, joined the tour as King in San Francisco in September.
“It takes three things to play Carole,” McGrath said.
“First, you need someone with a self-deprecating sense of humor. Second, you need someone who can break your heart, because the show has that. Third, you need someone who gets the emotion and power of these songs.
“It really needs a person of extraordinary heart. That’s what the music is. That’s what you’re going to see in Milwaukee from Julia.”